The StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series are back with an amazing line-up of speakers from across Europe and beyond! This year we will focus on struggles over urban property while drawing on empirical and theoretical accounts from cities across the globe.
This talk draws on empirical research in South Africa and India on land and housing tenure, property rights and ideas of citizenship coded in national legislation with rights in law and/or grounded claims of rights to the city. It explores through these two different country contexts, the role of property in awarding, renewing or denying individual claims to citizenship, moving between scales of the state and neighbourhood, to identify and articulate common processes. This is an exploratory talk in that there is no main argument that I advocate, but a deep discussion of evidence that illuminate the multiple connections between property and citizenship, and the multi-scalar barriers to realising an ‘inclusive citizenship’.
Part of the 2021/22 StadsSalonsUrbains lecture series 'Cities for People, not for Profit. From private ownership to communal stewardship'.
Dr Kamna Patel is Associate Professor at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London. She is currently on secondment with the INGO Christian Aid as their Race and Diversity Lead and will return to UCL in mid-2023. She has an academic and professional background in development studies, social policy and social development. Prior to her doctoral studies, Kamna Patel worked as a consultant and project manager for a UK development consultancy firm, working predominantly on land reform and urban livelihood issues in projects across Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
Her current research and field of practice concerns the relationships between race (understood as a racialised hierarchy of value) and development. This focus builds on three strands of research: (i) housing, land tenure and citizenship in the urban Global South, (ii) reflexive practice and postcolonial scholarship on the teaching and practice of ‘development’, and (iii) the application of a race lens to understanding and taking action for equity and justice.
The first of her research strands is essentially concerned with the role of property in awarding, seizing, denying or contesting citizenship rights, which are sometimes expressed with recourse to national legislation or a moral reference to the right to the city. Specifically, Kamna’s research has critically examined state-led approaches to low income housing schemes and tenure security in cities in the Global South, the effects of these approaches on individual and community wellbeing and realisations of citizenship, and the role of religious and/or ethnic identities therein.
The second of Kamna Patel’s research themes, reflexive practice and postcolonial scholarship on the teaching and practice of ‘development’, is an essential part of her own scholar identity as a reflexive practitioner and teacher. Further to critical self-reflection on her career as a consultant and project manager within the development industry, she have developed a strong research interest in the processes and politics of ‘othering’ prevalent in mainstream development policy and practice, and the constructions of knowledge upon which development interventions are planned. She applies this critical insight to the teaching of development studies and research of development issues.
The third strand brings together ideas of race and its material impact with practices of equality, diversity and inclusion in different institutional spaces. This is an applied strand of research and thinking.